


Everybody Eats When They Come to My House

by MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fluff, Food, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 12:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2228496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’ll ruin your dinner,” Sam says, gesturing with Steve with his spatula.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Eats When They Come to My House

“You’ll ruin your dinner,” Sam says, gesturing with Steve with his spatula.

People say a lot of strange things in the twenty-first century, but that has got to be one of the strangest. Steve pauses with a slice of pound cake already halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“You know, like when you’re a kid and you’re snacking in the afternoon, and your parents tell you to stop eating so that you’ll still be hungr—oh.”

Steve takes a bite of the cake. “Yeah,” he says, after chewing and swallowing. “Staying hungry wasn’t really a problem.”

Steve remembers being hungry before the serum. That was a hunger like a dull ache, as fixed a part of life as the distant view of the Manhattan skyline. No point in complaining about it. It was always there. They never had enough. ‘Ruining dinner’ could only have meant burning it or oversalting it, which he had done plenty of times. And then still eaten whatever he’d ruined, because he never wasted food.

After the serum, he needed four or five times as much food to feel full, and he felt awful about it. There was never enough for anybody during the war, and who was he to take more than his fair share? The serum made him hungrier, but it also made him more capable of enduring without food. He didn’t need as much sleep to get by, either. He spent the war hungry and tired, just like everybody else.

“Doesn’t seem like it’s a problem now, either,” Sam jokes, turning back toward the counter. He slides the spatula into one of his many kitchen appliances—Steve knows this one is called a food processor, but he’s not entirely sure how it’s different from the blender or the mixer that Sam also owns. But Sam is scraping buttermilk biscuit dough out of the food processor, so now is not the time to tease him about how much kitchen stuff he owns.

As long as Steve gets to keep eating Sam’s cooking, he’s never going to tease Sam about how much kitchen stuff he owns. In fact, Steve was almost tempted to buy Sam half the fancy kitchen store they visited last week as some kind of apology or thank-you for all the food he’s eaten. But Steve is new to having money, so he’s not very good at being a rich person yet. Is it weird and presumptuous to buy your friends stuff all the time? Instead Steve has just gotten very, very good at washing dishes.

Steve finishes his slice of pound cake in two bites and wipes his hands on his jeans. He probably should have used a plate and a fork, but he’s been roommates with Sam long enough now to have seen Sam eating potato chips in his boxers, so he knows Sam’s in no place to judge him. And if Sam doesn’t want Steve to eat pound cake at five in the afternoon, then he should stop baking pound cake and leaving it within easy reach. “Being hungry has never been a problem,” Steve says. “It’s finding enough to eat that’s the difficult part.”

“You’re lucky you met me,” Sam says, and Steve couldn’t agree more. Sam has been halfway around the world with him, looking for Bucky. He even moved to this apartment in Brooklyn with Steve while their search is temporarily on hold. “Now me, on the other hand, why I decided to move in with a bottomless pit like you, that’s a mystery.”

“If I weren’t here, you’d be surrounded by all the food you’d cooked with no one to feed it to,” Steve says. He tries to look as much like a hungry orphan as possible. Technically he is a hungry orphan, but telling that to Sam after Steve ate the last piece of rhubarb pie yesterday had not worked in his favor. “What are you making?”

Sam laughs. “Seriously?” He shakes his head and looks down at the skillet. It’s full of peas and asparagus and carrots and chicken, all simmering in broth. Sam is pouring the biscuit dough over the top of it. Then he puts on an oven mitt and slides the whole thing into the oven. “Kind of a chicken pot pie,” Sam says. “But lazier, since it only has the top crust.”

“Well, it smells amazing. Is there rosemary in it?”

“Look at you, ready to be a judge on Iron Chef,” Sam says. “I know you’d be eating frozen pizzas on your own, Rogers. Don’t lie.”

“Just because I can’t cook doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate good food when it’s served to me.”

“I see you laying it on thick. You late on the rent or something?”

“Nope. Just hungry.”

“Man,” Sam says. “Sometimes I can’t believe you.”

“What?”

“You’re like a cartoon character, with the suit and the saving the world and the constant eating. You ever see that show _Sailor Moon_? It was on TV when I was a kid.”

Sam makes him watch a few episodes over dinner. Steve isn’t sure he appreciates the comparison, but the cartoon is weirdly charming, and the pot pie is delicious, so he doesn’t complain.

*

“No,” Natasha says. Steve is beginning to think it’s her favorite word. He sighs. They just fought some kind of giant half-robot half-squid thing in Midtown and Steve is covered in blood and ink. The blood is mostly not his, and besides he feels fine, so he told Natasha he was just going to go home and shower.

“You can’t take the train looking like that,” she says, which is probably a good point, but Steve’s not taking a damn taxi, either. “My place is closer.”

“Your… place?” he says. Natasha is a normal human being. She has an apartment. She sleeps. Steve has just never really thought about it before. He’s never seen the inside of her apartment, or even heard her mention it. She just shows up at his place in Brooklyn if she wants to see him. The first time it happened, Sam had dropped his grocery bags in surprise and then they’d had to clean up the splattered remains of two dozen eggs. Natasha does a better job of announcing her presence since then.

She rolls her eyes, grabs his arm, and walks off down the block.

Natasha’s apartment isn’t as spartan and high-modern as Steve thought it would be. She lives in an old brick building in Hell’s Kitchen in a fourth-floor walk-up. The floors are wood. The couch looks well-worn. There are a lot of books but no guns or knives in sight. (On second thought, Steve feels silly for expecting some kind of post-Apocalyptic weapons stockpile.) There’s some discarded junk mail and half-empty water glasses on the coffee table. It looks like a home.

She hands him some clothes and a towel. “Don’t get ink on everything.”

“You have clothes in my size? But who—,”

That time, she doesn’t even need to say the word _no_. Steve walks toward the bathroom without another word.

Natasha’s shower is so tiny that he can’t turn around without knocking his elbows against the tile, but he manages to come out looking less like a walking nightmare. The t-shirt and sweatpants that Natasha handed him don’t smell like anything but laundry detergent. It’s a relief not to be covered in gore. On the heels of that thought comes exhaustion. He sits down heavily on Natasha’s couch.

The next thing he’s aware of is a crick in his neck and something soft and heavy covering him. A blanket. He’s still on Natasha’s couch. “How long have I been out?” he mumbles. The light is different.

“Three hours, you loser.”

It must be almost midnight. She let him sleep. She even put that blanket on top of him. Natasha keeps her guard up, but she likes him. Even so, he’s still getting accustomed to the idea that they’re friends and not just teammates. He never expected to make friends with a deadly Russian secret agent. He sits up and looks over the back of the couch, across the apartment. Natasha’s living room and kitchen are separated only by a counter. It has two bar stools on the living room side. Natasha is on the kitchen side, leaning intently over the counter, squeezing a bag of—pink frosting?

Steve gets up, stretching and rolling his shoulders. He walks over to the counter and sits down on one of the stools. On the counter, there must be thirty pale yellow cupcakes. Half of them have tiny pink frosting roses covering their tops. There are dishes sticky with cake batter in the sink. Natasha is squeezing the frosting through a little metal tip on the end of the plastic bag she’s holding, swiping it around the edge of the cupcake and finishing off another petal. The roses are beautiful, delicate, carefully made—but Steve finds one or two with an extra glob of frosting falling off the edge of the cupcake, and that makes him feel better somehow. Like Natasha’s not terrifyingly good at everything.

Just very, very competent.

The credit card offers and funding requests from charities and catalogs on Natasha’s coffee table, those make him feel better too.

“Cupcakes,” he says, because he has no idea what else to say. He refrains from pointing out that they are pink, flowery cupcakes. He guesses she’s not going to explain. That’s okay with him. He doesn’t need an explanation. They all do what they have to in order to cope. He reaches for a cupcake.

Natasha jabs his hand with the tip of the bag, leaving a streak of frosting across the back. “At least ask first.”

Steve regards the dollop of pink of the back of his hand. He didn’t grow up eating a lot of sweet things, but he loves them. Still, sometimes sugar is too cheap and abundant in the twenty-first century. He’s had frosting so sweet it left his mouth dry afterward. Natasha’s frosting doesn’t look like that, though. It looks like she made it herself.

He licks the back of his hand. The frosting is heavenly—creamy, smooth, subtly sweet. It tastes like raspberries. Steve blinks at Natasha. “You _made_ that?”

Steve feels the tiniest bit betrayed that all this time, Natasha has been able to make unbelievably delicious, five-star baked goods and he didn’t even know.

She looks right back at him and shrugs one shoulder.

“No, don’t be that way, Natasha. It’s good. Really good. Amazing. Better than all those bakeries people are always lining up outside. Take the credit.”

She almost smiles at him. “Fine. Thanks. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Pink frosting doesn’t go well with your whole mysterious, terrifying spy act, I guess,” Steve says.

“Shut up,” she says. “I’m embarrassed, that’s all.”

“Are you kidding? This is my new favorite thing about you. Natalia Romanova, super spy and baker of cupcakes. Can I have one?” After a second, he thinks better of it and adds: “Please?”

She pushes one across the counter towards him.

He peels the silver foil liner off without disturbing the frosting on top. A wasted effort, since he’s going to eat the whole thing in a second, but he’s impressed with Natasha’s work and he wants her to know. “We all handle it differently,” he says, making conversation. She shouldn’t be embarrassed about this. “I’m sure you’ve seen me scribbling.”

“Drawing,” she corrects, but Steve doesn’t pay any attention to her because the cake is even better than the frosting. He makes an appreciative noise and she pushes another one toward him.

“Sure, drawing,” he says, pulling the liner off the second cupcake.

She goes back to decorating the remaining cupcakes. “I don’t know, it’s just—,” she pauses, finishing a rose and then starting on another. He can see why she likes it. Baking and decorating cakes is precise, methodical work. It keeps her hands occupied, like drawing. “I own a mixer and all this equipment and I’m never even home and what do I need two dozen cupcakes for anyway, you know? No one ever comes over here.”

Steve would feel honored to be invited, except someone must have left the clothes that Steve is currently wearing.  He decides not to mention that. The sweatpants are a little too short for him, but that’s not much of a clue. Maybe an ex-boyfriend? Maybe a current boyfriend. Does Natasha even like men? Steve gives up trying to figure it out. “So you baked all this for me, is what you’re saying.”

“Well, normally after a fight I would collapse on the couch, but some asshole got there first.” Natasha smirks at him, then finishes decorating the last few cupcakes and picks up one for herself. She makes short work of it. Still chewing, she points and him and says, “You’re doing the dishes.”

Steve eats eleven more cupcakes. Giant robot squid aside, it’s a good day.

*

It takes fourteen months and two weeks from the day that the Winter Soldier pulled Steve out of the Potomac for Bucky to come home. He’s just sitting on the stoop one day when Steve comes home, his face scruffy and his long hair smashed under a baseball cap.

“Hey, Buck.” It comes out airless and tight, because Steve can’t breathe at the sight of him. But he’s here and he’s alive and he’s not trying to kill Steve, and that’s more than Steve ever dared to hope for. Steve never even thought this far ahead when he was dragging Sam all over the world, looking for Bucky. What do you say when your long-lost best friend who was brainwashed into trying to assassinate you shows up on your doorstep?

“Wanna eat?”


End file.
